“Spectacular” progress has been made towards useful quantum computers

Fully practical quantum computers are not here yet, but the quantum computing industry is ending the year on an optimistic note. At Silicon Valley’s Q2B conference in December, which brings together experts from business and quantum science, the consensus seemed to be that the future of quantum computing was only becoming clearer.

“Overall, we think it’s more likely than not that someone, or perhaps several people, will be able to create a truly industrially useful quantum computer, which I didn’t think we’d finish by the end of 2025,” Joe Altepeter, program director for the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said in a presentation at the conference. The goal of QBI is to determine which of the many currently competing approaches to building quantum computers can produce a useful device, which should also correct its own errors or be fault tolerant.

The program will span several years and involve hundreds of expert evaluators. Taking stock of the program after its first six months, Altepeter said the team had identified “huge obstacles” in the path of each of the approaches, but he also expressed surprise that this had not disqualified any of them from the race to produce a useful quantum device.

“At the end of 2025, my impression is that all the key hardware elements appear to be more or less in place, with about the required fidelity, perhaps for the first time, leaving just these huge questions about… technical challenges,” Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas at Austin said in another presentation. A respected expert and longtime industry commentator, Aaronson noted the ongoing challenges of identifying new algorithms that could lead to more practical uses of quantum computers, but called recent advances in hardware development “spectacular.”

There’s good reason to be excited about quantum computing hardware, but applications are lagging behind, said Google’s Ryan Babbush. At the conference, Google Quantum AI and several partners announced the finalists for the game-changing XPRIZE competition.

The work of the seven finalists includes simulations of biomolecules relevant to human health, algorithms that could augment conventional simulations of candidate materials for clean energy solutions, and calculations that could be factored into the diagnosis and treatment of diseases with complex causes.

“A few years ago, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about running applications on quantum computers. I’m more interested in it now,” said John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology, another important researcher and a leading voice in the field of quantum computing. In his presentation, he argued for near-term uses of quantum computers for scientific discovery.

Over the past year, several quantum computers have indeed been used for calculations, for example in materials and high-energy particle physics, in ways that may soon rival or surpass the best traditional computing methods.

A handful of applications have traditionally been identified as particularly suited to quantum computers, but there, too, more work remains to be done. For example, Pranav Gokhale of Infleqtion, a company that builds quantum devices from extremely cold atoms, presented a classic algorithm – Shor’s algorithm – that could be used to break much of the encryption used by today’s banks. This work represents the first implementation of a version of Shor’s algorithm on logical qubits – error-protected quantum computing components. However, this demonstration was still far from the computational complexity and computing power needed to enable easy decryption of encrypted information in the real world, highlighting how significant hardware and software improvements are still needed despite recent advances.

Dutch startup QuantWare has presented a possible solution to the industry’s grand hardware challenge: making quantum computers larger, which would make them more computationally powerful, without making them less reliable. The company’s quantum processor architecture promises to incorporate 10,000 qubits made from superconducting circuits, about a hundred times more than currently the most widely used superconducting quantum computers have. QuantWare’s Matt Rijlaarsdam says the first devices of this size could be fully functional within two and a half years. Several other companies, such as IBM and Quantinuum, aim to build large quantum computers in a similar time frame, while QuEra plans to produce 10,000 qubits made from ultracold atoms within just a year, so the competition will be as fierce as the engineering challenges.

And the industry is only expected to continue to grow, from $1.07 billion in global investments in 2024 to around $2.2 billion in 2027, according to a quantum computing industry survey conducted by Hyperion Research.

“More people have access to quantum computers than ever before, and I suspect they will do things with them that we never could have thought of,” said Jamie Garcia of IBM.